entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 162 ] The Past
presents Technowar as a production system that can be rationally managed
and warfare as a kind of activity that can be scientifically determined by
constructing computer models. Increase their resources and the war-managers
claim to know what will happen. What constitutes their knowledge
is an array of numbers—numbers of U.S. and allied forces, numbers of VC
[Vietcong] and NVA [North Vietnamese Army] forces, body counts, kill
ratios—numbers that appear scientific, (pp. 155-156)
There is also evidence here for theories like that of Robert Jay Lifton
(1970, 1987), which argues that what is rationally repressed, the emotional,
can return "in crazy or criminal acts." Consider these comments by William
Bundy, Robert McNamara, John McNaughton, and Richard Helms about
the rationale for the bombing of North Vietnam:
the resumption of bombing after a pause would be even more painful to
the population of North Vietnam than a fairly steady rate of bombing. ...
. . . "water-drip" technique . . .
It is important not to "kill the hostage" by destroying the North Vietnamese
assets inside the "Hanoi donut"....
Fast/full squeeze .. . progressive squeeze-and-talk . ..
.. . the "hot-cold" treatment ... the objective of "persuading" Hanoi,
which would dictate a program of painful surgical strikes . ..
. . . our "salami-slice" bombing program . . .
. . . ratchet. . .
. . . one more turn of the screw . . .
(all quotes from Ellsberg, 1972, p. 304)
Daniel Ellsberg admits that he heard such talk all the time from these men
and, while he often disagreed with the policies they advocated, he never saw
what his wife did when she first read them: "It is the language of torturers"
(304; emphasis added). Torture was the policy:
By early 1965, McNamara's Vietnam strategy was essentially a conventional-war
version of the counterforce/no-cities theory—using force as an
instrument of coercion, withholding a larger force that could kill the
hostage of the enemy's cities if he didn't back down. (Kaplan, 1983,
p. 329)
This strategy was based directly on Thomas Schelling s elaboration of
game theory in the case of non-zero-sum games, which are those contests
where there isn't one winner and one loser, but there's a chance to have a